Alyssa,

I suspect that by now you have been inundated with offers of consulting services as well 
as a variety of one-off quotes for services. I'm sure that you've found quite a range of 
numbers.

Consulting can be very market-driven, but it also has a dependency upon the consultant's 
business model and overhead. A sole proprietor may have a lower hourly rate because 
she's not paying for management, sales, marketing, and a support staff. Someone 
working for a large consulting firm will come in at a higher rate because of all those 
things. You really want to determine what you're looking for in terms of qualifications of 
the person doing the work. The description of work that you provided is fairly simple and 
is likely something that could be handled by a less experienced analyst, although the 
historical appraisal aspect is critical.

Over the years, a model that I have for estimating the cost of a project looks like this: to 
get to the hourly rate, you start with the annual salary number that your organization 
would be willing to pay the type of person that would have the skills that you need. For 
many organizations, decide the salary grade you'd hire into, and determine the midpoint 
of that salary band. To make the numbers simple, let's say the number is $100,000. Then 
add 150% to that number. In the example, that gets you to $250,000. Divide that number 
by 2080 (working hours in a year). That gives you a rounded number of $120 an hour. 
Now you can play with that number a lot, but if you decide what you're willing to pay, you 
should be able to then find a consultant who will bid in at or below that number. (Clearly, 
you can also back into an equivalent annual salary for someone based upon their quoted 
rate.) The biggest trick is to be realistic in how you get there. Government and libraries 
are notoriously cheap in what they pay professional staff in archives and records.

Next you'll have to figure out what you think the project will take to perform in terms of 
hours. Appraisal can be quite simple or quite difficult, depending upon the nature of the 
records. A couple hundred boxes of accounts payable records can be appraised in a few  
hours; hundreds of boxes of mixed office files can be a nightmare for the appraiser. So 
you likely need to gain some familiarity with the collection and perhaps do an initial 
appraisal yourself to judge the amount of time it will take. If you're not comfortable 
taking that step, then you really need to be conversant with the contents of those boxes 
because the prospective consultant is going to ask about them, as well as the size of the 
boxes. They'll also want to know what you have in terms of existing policy and retention 
schedules. There's a big difference between applying an existing schedule and creating a 
schedule from nothing based upon an inventory.

After that, it's up to your procurement team.

I'm sure that there are folks out there who will debate my rule of thumb ad nauseam, but 
the net of it is that no consultant works for the hourly equivalent of a base salary in the 
outside world. As a consultant, you're going to have some sort of overhead, office 
expenses, taxes, healthcare, and, perhaps most importantly, downtime. If you get paid 
$100,000 in a salaried job, charging $50 an hour as a consultant will cost you money 
against that salaried job. Not only because of the overhead that you now have to pay 
yourself, but because you're not going to bill 2000 hours a year. Certainly, if you have 
bills to pay you might just take what you can get, but it sets a bad precedent.

Hope this helps.

Patrick Cunningham, FAI
(Not a consultant)

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